Just over twenty years ago, an academic tome captured the West’s imagination. The End of History and the Last Man (1992) by Francis Fukuyama followed fast on the heels of the collapse of communism. Giving voice to the triumphalism and hope of the times, it became an immediate bestseller. History, Fukuyama argued, was over. This was because the West had won the long ideological battle over which configuration of political economy could best manage the twenty-first century, and beyond. Western-style free markets and liberal democracy would now spread across the world, creating stability and opportunity for all in their wake.

Two decades on and the narrative is at best frayed. Democracy is in retreat, as evidenced by the hardening anti-democratic line of Russia and China, as well as by a shift to quasi-authoritarianism by a number of newly minted democracies. Even within core Western polities, trust in and engagement with political leaders and parties are at record lows. This is particularly the case as liberal states engage in massive surveillance programs against their own citizens.

The novel begins with the burnished quality of something handed down through generations, its opening lines like the first breath of a myth. Seductive in tone and concision, charged with an  aura of enchantment, the early paragraphs of George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964) do more than merely lure the reader into the narrative. In these sentences, Johnston reveals the conviction and control of a master storyteller who, at the outset, establishes his ambition and literary lineage:

My brother Jack does not come into the story straight away. Nobody ever does, of course, because a person doesn’t begin to exist without parents and an environment and legendary tales told about ancestors and dark dusty vines growing over outhouses where remarkable insects might always drop out of hidden crevices.

Since the publication of Tamarisk Row (1974), Gerald Murnane has continued to shape his own peculiar literary landscape. With The Plains (1982), he perfected the novelistic expression of his style; since then Murnane has concentrated on hybrid forms better suited to his purposes. Landscape with Landscape (1985), Velvet Waters (1990), and A History of Books (2012) are high points of this phase, but his newest fiction, A Million Windows, is in every part their equal.

Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in March was a dramatic sign of Russia’s sense that it had recovered from its post-Soviet weakness. Viewed in the West as an outrage, in Russia the seizure was portrayed as a triumph, the culmination of a national resurgence under Vladimir Putin. It remains to be seen how long this mood of triumph will last. 

President Putin’s popularity has long been buoyed by high prices for oil, Russia’s main export. On top of this oil bonanza, which saw national GDP double in a decade, Putin’s popularity has spiked after shows of strength like Russia’s 2008 invasion of the Caucasian republic of Georgia. In 2011–12 his standing slumped when his return to the presidency ruled out a new liberal era in Russian politics. The seizure of Crimea has sent Putin’s approval rating back to 2008 levels, demonstrating the link between Kremlin muscle-flexing and the political balance inside Russia.

Matthew Condon is fast becoming the George R.R. Martin of Australian true crime. Like the Game of Thrones author, Condon is part-way through the delivery of a saga of epic proportions. However, whereas some fantasy fiction fans doubt that Martin will ever conclude his A Song of Ice and Fire series, everyone knows how the story of corruption in Joh Bjelke-Petersen-era Queensland ends. But knowing the ending doesn’t lessen the shock of the telling. Jacks and Jokers, the second instalment of Condon’s trilogy (the conclusion, All Fall Down, is slated for release in 2015), sprawls and appals in equal measure.

For anyone who has ever complained about a difficult mother, or written a memoir about one, this is a humbling book. How trivial, by comparison, our complaints seem. The subtitle promises (or threatens) a disturbing memoir, and so it is. I found it difficult to get out of my head days after reading it.

Biff (born Elizabeth in 1942) Ward was the second child of historian Russel Ward, author of The Australian Legend (1958), and his wife Margaret. Their first child, Alison, had died at four months old, drowned accidentally when her mother fainted while bathing her. Russel told Biff this when she was five or six. That death haunted Biff’s childhood, but it was only much later that she discovered what had really happened. The unveiling of this secret is kept to the end, but its looming presence gives the narrative a creepy power.

When I was commissioned to write this review, I assumed that this book would be a conventional political biography. I looked forward to reading about Dunstan’s career as premier of South Australia (1967–68 and 1970–79), as his record of achievements showed that our states and territories have the potential to be powerful players in social and cultural reform. However, the focus of Dino Hodge’s intriguing book is Dunstan the man, with an emphasis on the way in which his personal beliefs and ambiguous sexuality influenced his political life and legacy. Don Dunstan, Intimacy and Liberty makes a solid contribution to our understanding of Dunstan and the blurring of his private and public life, fanned partly by the media, but also, sometimes inadvertently, by the man himself.

While the author acknowledges the broad scope of the Dunstan Decade – such as support for the arts, urban planning, indigenous land rights, and multiculturalism – Hodge shows most interest in Dunstan’s commitment to the rights of homosexuals. The author spends a great deal of the early chapters of the book describing aspects of Adelaide’s evolving homosexual subculture, with a stress on the postwar period up to the 1970s. Combined with heavy-handed police persecution and entrapment, the illegality of homosexual activity and general homophobia in the community led to an oppressive environment where fear of exposure as a gay man was visceral. Hodge’s incorporation of oral history sources helps readers born in a more liberal era to understand how brave Dunstan was to champion the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1970s.

Forty years ago next Christmas, a cyclone devastated Australia’s northernmost city, Darwin. It is a disaster still clear in the living memory of most Australians over fifty, but it also belongs to the past, the time before we had become aware of climate change. At the time, it was the kind of natural disaster to be expected in summer in the Top End, even if its festive timing appeared ominous in some mysterious way. There have been government reports, memoirs, books, and documentaries about Cyclone Tracy. Forty years appears long enough for an event to become history, but the cyclone has not yet become integrated into a significant national narrative.

Sophie Cunningham suggests that Cyclone Tracy does have a message for contemporary Australians, who should expect more of these devastating weather events as the seas increase their temperature. She writes that her main motivation in writing about the cyclone ‘is the fact that the human race is transforming the land, the seas and the weather’. The recent hurricanes of the Northern Hemisphere, particularly those assaults on the world’s most affluent nation, Katrina and Sandy (as Cunningham explains, cyclones belong to the Southern Hemisphere, hurricanes to the Northern one), certainly confront any complacency about the capacity of modern cities to resist extreme weather events. Darwin’s cyclone provides an Australian example, and a relatively small-scale comparison with these more devastating recent catastrophes.

Science may well have revolutionised our world, but David Knight finds ‘revolution’ to be an inexact metaphor for the ‘chancy, many stranded story’ he describes. He explores models from biography, with associated concepts of infancy, adolescence, and maturity, before settling on voyages of exploration and discovery. This choice is inspired in part by Newton’s self-portrait of playing on the shore before a great ocean of undiscovered truth, and Wordsworth’s subsequent poetic expansion of Newton ‘Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone’ for all eternity. Indeed, voyaging in strange seas provides a much more resonant and nuanced metaphor than the more common (and perhaps more marketable) revolutionary subtitle.

Voyages of discovery have a close connection, both literal and metaphoric, with the development of science. As Europeans discovered the rest of the world, with different ways of being and doing, they also discovered different ways of seeing and thinking. New cultures and new creatures challenged European preconceptions about the order of the world and their place in it. Asian and African approaches to mathematics, astronomy, engineering, philosophy, literature, and medicine permeated into Europe, generating the necessary preconditions for a new approach to knowledge generation. The same ships that carried these new ideas and new experiences also brought with them new technologies, creating unimagined possibilities in industry and education.

A while ago, I was walking through Melbourne Central station when I was buffeted on all sides. Muscular minders were pushing back a crowd of jostling fans from a red carpet. Everyone was holding iPhones above their heads. They had come to see two Hollywood stars. But Hollywood is different these days. One star was playing a mutant who could grow adamantium claws from his hands. The other, an ordinary character, happened to be a dwarf.

Such is the modern freak show, where inspiration and tawdriness are all mixed up. We gawp and giggle at parades of biggest losers and embarrassing bodies, but we also celebrate dwarf actors, paralympic heroes, and chat-show hosts with missing limbs. We don’t call them freaks or crips or fatties. Yet the virtuous admiration of the differently-abled is never far from the raucous spirit of the sideshow. Deep down, many still have the innocent curiosity and cruelty of the child.

In Bark’s second story, ‘The Juniper Tree’, an unnamed narrator sings ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ with calculated slowness to alter ‘not just the attitude of the song but the actual punctuation, turning it into a protest and question’. Lorrie Moore’s writing career to date strikes a similar counterbalance between form and content: irrepressible linguistic exuberance tempers – and sometimes even succeeds in confuting – an essentially saturnine world view.

Bark gathers together eight stories published by Moore since 2003 in literary magazines such as the New Yorker, Paris Review, and Granta. There is a conspicuous absence of formal experimentation in these stories compared with the ones in her first collection, Self-Help (1985), which play with a variety of structural frameworks and use the second person almost exclusively. The exceptions are ‘Wings’ and ‘Referential’, which are clever revisions of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Signs and Symbols’ respectively. In ‘Wings’, Kate Croy becomes KC, who, like her precursor, proves to be very good at waiting. In ‘Referential’ – a title that names the specific type of mania the son in Nabokov’s story suffers from and also looks and sounds a lot like ‘reverential’, which is what Moore is being here – a wrong number presents an opportunity for misreading and therefore a trap, though this time for a character rather than the reader.

To take to the road on a bike, especially if you are a solo female cyclist, is to make yourself vulnerable, submitting yourself to hours of muscle-taxing solitude and reliance on the kindness of strangers. But while slower and physically more arduous than other modes of transport, cycling brings you closer to your surroundings. It offers different perspectives and unexpected insights.

ABC Classic FM breakfast presenter Emma Ayres’s Cadence recounts her ride on a Cannondale named Vita from Shrewsbury to Hong Kong with her violin (Aurelia) strapped to her back. Part memoir, part travel writing, Cadence is more than an account of an intercontinental cycling voyage. It is a coming-of-age story that turns on the trope of ‘[c]adence in music, cadence in cycling, cadence in speech’, narrating Ayres’s evolution as a professional musician, a serious amateur cyclist, and a radio broadcaster.

Just war theory

Dear Editor,

Andrew Alexandra is not persuaded by my defence of war (June–July 2014). I am not persuaded by his attack on it.

First, he compares my ‘permissive’ account of Just War Theory unfavourably with the supposed ‘orthodox’ version, which follows international law in holding that the only just cause for war is a threat to peace, especially aggression. The problem with this is its complete neglect of the emergent doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’, which regards the egregious violation of human rights as just cause for aggressive intervention. This may not yet be orthodox, but it has elicited support from the patriarch of modern just war theory, Michael Walzer.

ABR Patrons’ Fellowship

Because of the kindness of our many Patrons, we are able to offer another ABR Patrons’ Fellowship, worth $5,000. We are seeking proposals for a major article on any subject. ABR Fellows work closely with Peter Rose, and interested writers are encouraged to speak to the Editor before applying. Applications close on 30 September.

Jolley Prize

Our indefatigable judges are in the process of finalising the shortlist for the 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which is worth a total of $8,000. The three nominated stories will appear in our September issue, which will be launched at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on Saturday, 30 August (5.30 pm, The Cube). A special guest will name the overall winner, who will receive $5,000.

Events galore

ABR is involved in many events this month and next. Advances is particularly looking forward to the public forum on Thomas Piketty’s bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Mark Triffitt, who reviews Capital for us in this issue, will be in conversation with Ross Garnaut, with Glyn Davis (another contributor this month) as moderator.

National Biography Award

It is a strikingly eclectic shortlist for this year’s National Biography Award, worth $25,000. Six biographies and memoirs have been shortlisted: Alison Alexander’s The Ambitions of Jane Franklin (Allen & Unwin), Janet Butler’s Kitty’s War (UQP), Steve Bisley’s Stillways: A Memoir (HarperCollins), John Cantwell and Greg Bearup’s Exit Wounds: One Australian’s War on Terror (MUP), Sheila Fitzpatrick’s A Spy in the Archives (MUP), and Gideon Haigh’s On Warne (Hamish Hamilton). This month, Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews another absorbing memoir: Biff Ward’s candid study of her ‘legendary’ father, historian Russel Ward, and her troubled mother.

Vale Liam Davison

Among the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was Australian novelist Liam Davison, whose books included The Velodrome (1988), Soundings (1993), and The Betrayal (2001). Between 1990 and 1998 we published nineteen of his reviews. Also killed on 17 July was his wife, veteran Melbourne schoolteacher Frankie Davison. Our sympathies go to the Davison family and to all the families of the victims of this appalling crime.

Sonnetathon

Sonneteers and Shakespearians enjoyed our first Sonnet--Thon back in 2012. To mark the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, we will repeat the Sonnet-A-Thon during the Melbourne Writers’ Festival (Saturday, 23 August, 4 pm, The Cube). Past Sonnet-A-Thoners Lisa Gorton and Peter Rose will be joined by Jakob Zigarus. They may not read all 154 sonnets, as actors Harriet Walter and Simon Russell Beale did in London recently, but they will include as many as possible.

Changes at APJ

Australian Poetry Journal has a new format, layout, and editor, as well as much new poetry. Michael Sharkey succeeds Bronwyn Lea, the founding editor. In the foreword to this the sixth issue (Vol. 4, no. 1), Sharkey signals his intention ‘to accord a place to Australian artists’ and photographers’ work’. Poets include Cassandra Atherton, Brook Emery, and Tony Page. Philip Salom has an essay on William Hart-Smith, and Andrew Taylor writes about translating Montale.

Pauline animadversions

Russell Marks must have had fun compiling The Book of Paul: The Wit and Wisdom of Paul Keating (Black Inc., $9.99 pb). The collection, minute though it is, packs a punch, as you might expect. It is full of characteristically temperate character assessments from the former PM. Try the first entry, on Alexander Downer: ‘The idiot son of the aristocracy.’ Or Stephen Smith: ‘He’s always between a shit and a shiver.’

New features on our website

Our new website offers many new features, and we’re delighted that so many of our print subscribers have added ABR Online to their subscriptions (free of charge). We’ve been having fun creating mini-anthologies of key features that appeared in ABR Online, and these new resources will grow in coming months. Check out the Editor’s Choices, Key Authors and Critics, the Art of Fiction, Poetry and Biography – and Open Page, where all these lively Q&As now appear on open access. Remember: ABR Online costs as little as $6 for thirty days’ access, or $25 for those who are twenty-five and under.

Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal

Lisa Gorton – author of two poetry collections, Press Release (2007) and Hotel Hyperion (2013), and Poetry Editor of ABR – is this year’s Philip Hodgins Memorial Medallist. The Medal, presented at the Mildura Writers’ Festival, commemorates the life and work of the great Australian poet Philip Hodgins, who died in 1995.

The Commonwealth Games, like the Commonwealth of Nations, often seem irrelevant. I intended to declare my bias in this review when I found author Brian Oliver saying the same thing on the first page of his introduction. But, as the author points out, the Games have survived the political, cultural, and sporting odds for more than eighty years and have a rich sporting history.

In explaining his reasons for writing The Commonwealth Games, Oliver states: ‘it was a challenge, because nobody in Britain had done so before and because … there were a great many untold stories worth telling.’ One of the author’s main claims (and that of some respondents) is that the Commonwealth Games are the ‘Friendly Games’, in contrast with the nationalism associated with the Olympics. Surely, though, this contention is dubious, especially in Australia, where, as former national athletics coach and academic John Daly has written, ‘our national sport is winning’. Medal tallies are taken seriously by athletes, the mass media, and a large proportion of sports followers.

Prime ministers seem to value longevity, whether it is Bob Hawke relishing the fact that he served longer than John Curtin and Ben Chifley combined, or John Howard relishing that he served longer than Hawke. But no prime minister is likely to serve as long as Robert Menzies’ sixteen years as prime minister from 1949 to 1966. His record is even more impressive when his earlier term (1939–1941) is included.

It is Menzies’ first term as prime minister that occupies most of Anne Henderson’s Menzies at War. That was when Menzies took Australia into World War II, only for him to resign shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The outbreak of the Pacific War placed Australia in a desperate position, with the country bereft of tanks, modern fighter aircraft, or four-engine bombers, and with most of its navy and army deployed far from home.

In a recent Prospect interview, distinguished Princeton and ANU scholar Philip Pettit described political philosophy as a conversation around various themes. Some voices focus on power or freedom, others on democracy or the nature of the state. The conversation should extend beyond the academy, argued Pettit, to embrace public intellectuals, journalists, commentators, political scientists, activists, and government. 

Above all, Pettit suggests, political philosophy should be engaged. Aim to understand and move the world. Political philosophy is a guide to what we can do, alone and together. Hence Just Freedom, a volume with intentions captured in the subtitle: A Moral Compass for a Complex World. Amid the noise of political life, Pettit offers principles to shape decisions. For him, justice is freedom, freedom justice. Be clear about what constitutes justice, and you have a robust basis for decisions about life, political communities, and global sovereignty.

Wilhelm II, German Kaiser and King of Prussia, may be a shadowy figure for Australian readers, better known as the butt of funny-scary caricatures in British World War I propaganda or of black humour in popular soldiers’ songs, than as a political player in his own right. He remains enigmatic even for scholars. Some hand him the burden of responsibility for World War I, despite the immediate trigger being the military standoff between two other states altogether, Austro-Hungary and Serbia. Others see him as an incompetent figurehead who merely rubberstamped the territorial ambitions of the German military.

The third and final volume of John C.G. Rohl’s biography, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, lays the second view to rest. Wilhelm had a succession of lapdog chancellors, unlike his revered grandfather Wilhelm I, who appointed and placed full confidence in the architect of German unification, Otto von Bismarck, a superb diplomat and a canny domestic politician who pioneered the welfare state. Wilhelm II, considerably less capable and less liberal than his grandfather, had no such figure beside him to counsel or restrain him, and nor was he likely to have listened if he had. Instead, he subjected a succession of ministers to paranoid rants while he planned his grandiose schemes to make Germany the paramount power in Europe and, hence, the world. He was going to destroy the powerful British navy. He was going to build the Baghdad–Berlin railway and unite the Muslim world behind him. He was going to finish off Russian territorial ambitions once and for all. And all this with ‘my’ army and ‘my’ navy, in defence of ‘my’ empire and ‘my’ house, the royal house of Hohenzollern.

Disdaining the opening moves traditionally associated with literary biography – the expected orderly progress through ancestry, parentage, birth, schooling, juvenilia – John Drury’s masterly new account of the life and poetry of George Herbert begins instead with the poem that Drury sees as Herbert’s finest work, written in mid-career, ‘Love (III)’. Herbert designed this poem as the culminating piece in the collection upon which his poetic reputation would come ultimately to rest, The Temple (1633).

Paul Giles has done important work reimagining North American literary history as allied rather than isolationist – revisioning American literature not as the definition of landlocked nation or exceptional homeland but as the product of transatlantic and continental traverses of forms and voices. In three books, Transatlantic Insurrections (2001), Atlantic Republic (2006), and The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011), he has uncovered the lines of influence and adaptation between North American, British, and European literary cultures. As a geographical materialist, he focuses on individual authors, overlaid with their spatial and historical environments from the colonialist, to the revolutionary, to the postmodern. But he is not an Archimedean, seeking a still perspective from somewhere above or beyond. Rather, his outlook is shaped by cartographical models of the globe with their surface mosaics of national territories and periods. Whether geographical, historical, or literary, the world is always remappable. His impulse is a deterritorialising one, looking out from within the literary work, that imaginary space from which selves, borders, hemispheres, the nation, the world can be reperceived and co-ordinates reversed or rotated.

Three bluetongues reside in our steep bush garden
of sandstone ledges and the stumps of fallen trees.
One is content to doze under a rock while around her
everyone chatters; one lost the pointy end of its tail
to a neighbour’s cat and one dozes in the dead plot
beneath brown grass cuttings and when disturbed,
scampers off to hide in the drain under the steps.
I’m tempted to give them Australian nicknames
like Liz, Stumpy and Handbag. At least these lizards
will never attempt to scare away a lawn mower
with the forked lightning of their tongues.
When I take the poets on a tour of the garden,
Liz comes out from under a log, a life model
unveiling for a portrait. She’s happy enough to bask
in the warm afternoon sun and soak up the attention.
Why fret about where you are in the scheme of things?
Instead, cultivate the blissful solitude of a bluetongue,
grow fat and warm on the exposed rocks
that nature bequeaths you and occasionally open one eye
to gaze at the theatrical manoeuvrings of those
whose blood is thick and cold with unfulfilled ambition.

The woman’s hands
are tied behind her back –

A quiet night in the square,
taxis parked with their side-lights on
and engines cut, drivers
muttering under a fuzzy streetlamp.
A stray dog considers an old milk carton.

The three parts of Dominique Wilson’s story are linked together by racial prejudice, of Australians towards Asians, and of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese towards Westerners. She picks up this well-worn thread in pre-Federation Australia and weaves it in and out of the narrative, tying it off when China is in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. During the twentieth century, her three men – two Chinese and one Australian – are afflicted by racism to different degrees. How strange, then, to call her book The Yellow Papers, without explaining the significance of that loaded adjective. What papers? Wartime telegrams, ancient documents, or something else?

In a blurb, Brian Castro – Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where Wilson received her doctorate – praises her impeccable research and unforgiving realism. Wilson’s reading has evidently included The Analects of Confucius and Eric Rolls’s work on Chinese sojourners, and she may well have based Chen Mu, the first of her men, on the cook in Mrs Aeneas Gunn’s We of the Never-Never. Her observations of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Adelaide are evocative, and Umberumberka, now Silverton, a mining town in Mad Max country near Broken Hill, is photographically presented.

Hedda Gabler (1890) occupies a somewhat schizophrenic position in Henrik Ibsen’s work. On the one hand, it is normally seen as the apotheosis of Ibsen’s realist period, his sardonic homage to the fashionable ‘well-made play’ of the time. But, on the other hand, from early in its theatrical life there have been productions which have reacted against the naturalistic style in which the play seems to have been couched.

The Russian director Vslevold Meyerhold’s 1906 production had Hedda centrally enthroned while the rest of the cast struck poses and declaimed their lines in a monotone apparently so as to downplay the personal relationships and concentrate on Ibsen’s attack on bourgeois society. Ingmar Bergman’s iconic Swedish production, which electrified London audiences when Peter Daubeny imported it in one of his world theatre seasons in 1968 and which Bergman revived not so successfully for the National Theatre, concentrated on Hedda’s psyche. Bergman divided the stage with a centre panel, so that the audience saw not only the room in which the play is normally set but also the inner room to which Hedda retreats and throughout the play she could be seen pacing, staring at her reflection, and playing with her father’s pistols.

Henrik Ibsen (1906)

These two very different approaches highlight the central enigma of the play’s protagonist. Is Hedda simply a psychopath, a narcissist with a tendency towards melodrama, or is she a captive of her era, a woman of strength and intelligence whose fear of scandal has condemned her to a limited, meaningless existence and has warped her judgement?

Neither of these questions is answered or indeed even asked in the train wreck that calls itself Hedda Gabler at the Belvoir. In the original play, Hedda is a true product of her hidebound, nineteenth-century provincial society. The haute-bourgeois daughter of a general, married to Tesman, a dull, decent academic, she is fascinated by his unstable rival, Ejlert Lövborg, whom she romanticises into some sort of Dionysian figure with whom she never had the nerve to have an affair. She is willing to enter into a discreet ménage à trois with Judge Brack, but lacks the courage to do what the outwardly more conventional Thea Elvsted does and leave her husband. For some reason that, judging from her program notes, does not seem clear even to the director, Adena Jacobs, the play has been set in the present in a sort of dream America. This immediately negates the idea of a woman trapped by social convention. In nineteenth-century Europe, for an upper-class young woman to lose her virginity to a drunken reprobate, however romantic he might seem, would have been a dangerous step to take. In the present day, it would seem to be simply a rite of passage. Moreover, Ibsen contrasts Hedda’s cowardice with the courage of Thea Elvsted, who is willing to do what then would have been considered unthinkable and leave her husband to be with another man, something that is now an everyday occurance.

 Marcus Graham as Brack and Ash Flanders as Hedda Gabler (photograph by Ellis Parrinder)

Having removed the social context in which the characters operate, one might think that Jacobs would have concentrated on the relationships between them. But the play has been so cut, or butchered, that we have the barest understanding of who these people are and how they interact. We lose Hedda’s edgy relationship with Tesman’s aunt Julie and her sarcastic put-downs of the servant Berte. Most of the banter between Hedda and Brack that clearly underlines their power play has gone. With the density of the play removed, what we are left with is a bunch of actors wandering onstage to give us the barest of plot points, which are punctuated by endless musical interludes. We are a long way from Ibsen – closer perhaps to performance art or some Zen nightmare.

Given the circumstances, it may be unfair to comment on the actors, but here goes. The stalwarts, Lynette Curran as Julie and Marcus Graham as Brack, do their best to provide some sort of characterisation and momentum, but they end up defeated. Of the rest, Tim Walter’s Tesman hardly registers. As Lövborg, Oscar Redding drastically lacks the charisma central to the role. Anna Houston as Thea is an embarrassment, and Branden Christine as Berte skulks around to no great purpose.

Tim Walter as Tesman (photograph by Ellis Parrinder)

And then there is Ash Flanders. There is no reason why a man should not play Hedda. One can imagine what the great Charles Ludlam must have made of the part when he played it in Pittsburg. His Camille, which I was lucky enough to witness, was an amazing blend of gender, camp, melodrama, and tragedy – artifice which led us to truth. Flanders’s whiny, one-note performance leads us nowhere and gives us no clue as to why he was cast.

How this disaster made it on to the main stage of the Belvoir is something that management need to consider.

Belvoir St Theatre’s production of Hedda Gabler, adapted by Adena Jacobs from the play by Henrik Ibsen, and directed by Adena Jacobs, runs until 3 August 2014 at Belvoir’s Upstairs Theatre. Performance attended 3 July.

The last time the National Gallery of Victoria devoted an exhibition to furniture was in 1988 (Featherston Chairs), and only the most dedicated design aficionados will remember the gallery’s most recent group show of furniture design: One Hundred Chairs, back in 1974. Mid-Century Modern, broad in its ambition, covers Australian furniture design in the thirty-year immediate postwar period. It forms an interesting comparison to the recent touring exhibition from the Los Angeles County Museum, California Design, 1930–65, shown at Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane last summer and reviewed here in December 2013–January 2014.

The painting of the Yuendumu doors in 1984 by Warlpiri artists, whose country is north-west of Alice Springs, represented an extraordinary moment in Australian art and modern art generally. In the 1980s some Aboriginal elders painted the doors in the Yuendumu School building to prompt students to show respect for their school and as a marker of their culture. It was the first time that they had painted using acrylics (not ochres), in colours never before used, to record the major stories of their community.

The paintings represented the birth of a new form of expression of the art of this central desert community. It had nothing to do with reference to any external artistic tradition or practice. The artists were working entirely from their own imaginations, depicting stories of the land of epic proportions, although the stories remained largely unknown to the uninitiated. It was a project akin to the famous moment of instigation of the Western Desert art movement at Papunya in 1971, when artists painted the walls of the school at that community under the auspices of the school teacher Geoffrey Bardon.

There was a recent flurry of Australian media interest in the wake of the publication of a new edition of the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, edited by Tony Thorne. Thorne only added a small number of new Australian slang termsto the new edition: ‘ort’, buttocks; ‘tockley’, penis; and ‘unit’, defined as a bogan. The apparent lack of new Australian slang terms was a cause of some anxiety: did it indicate we were losing our famed linguistic inventiveness? Was it a sign of our maturing as a nation? Or did it mean that Americanisms had finally taken over our language?

Australians have a long history of anxiety about their language. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concerns were often expressed about the accent (sometimes described as the ‘colonial twang’). In an 1893 speech to the Methodist Ladies’ College, for example, Victorian Chief Justice John Madden instructed young Australians to ‘pronounce the English vowels as they were intended’. The accent would continue to be controversial until well into the twentieth century, with an accent closer to British Received Pronunciation for many years being the preferred sound for radio and television.

Hamish McDonald has for more than thirty years written about foreign affairs and defence in Asia for publications such as the Sydney Morning Herald, Far Eastern Economic Review, and, more recently, as the world editor for the Saturday Paper. His writings on Indonesian politics and Australian complacency over the Balibo controversy have been more likely to put him in the firing line than on the bestseller’s list in Jakarta’s bookshops, but his tenacity and journalistic skills place him among Australia’s finest. In a departure from his usual subject matter, McDonald has shone a spotlight on Japan’s historical past in the form of a memoir. A War of Words owes its origins to a chance encounter while he was on assignment in Tokyo when the Japanese economic bubble was at its peak. After a fellow journalist gave him a box of papers that included photographs and an anecdotal manuscript of the life and adventures of one Charles Bavier, McDonald spent the better part of three decades piecing together the details of Bavier’s colourful life. Besides being an excellent tale, The War of Words represents an enlightening chapter in the history of both Japan and its ever-changing relationship with Australia.

For all their differences of subject matter and approach (not to mention style), both of these studies can be seen as belonging to the category of what might be termed archaeological history. That is, they are concerned with retrieving and bringing to the surface a gallery of characters and set of important stories and connections which have been either suppressed or ignored.

In the case of Michael Haas’s account of the obliteration of an entire generation of (mostly) Jewish composers and musicians, the process was, of course, implemented by the appalling policies of the Nazis. One of the more sobering aspects of his study is that, in spite of his own considerable efforts as a Decca record producer with the series ‘Entartete [literally: degenerate] Musik’, only a few of these composers have managed to re-establish themselves in the concert or opera repertoire.

It may seem strange to begin a review of Paul Carter’s extraordinary poetry collection by quoting the words of another writer, but these lines of Boris Pasternak’s – taken from his essay in The Poet’s Work (1989), a collection of writings by twentieth-century poets on their art – seem particularly pertinent:

By its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry
seeks out the melody of
nature amid the tumult of the
dictionary, and then, picking it up
as one picks up a tune, abandons itself to
improvisation upon that theme.

Seeking perfection or ‘enlightenment’ requires a monastic devotion to the life of the spirit and a rejection of material comforts. Judith Beveridge’s writings about the young Buddha and his cousin Devadatta bring out all the intricacies and contradictions inherent in such a quest.

This new volume, Devadatta’s Poems, holds up a kind of mirror to ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, the middle section of her book Wolf Notes (2003), which depicted Siddhārtha Gautama’s travels and contemplations before he became the Buddha. The earlier work is marked by its quiet determination, matching Siddhārtha’s, to look precisely, without wanting, and to be simply an existence among all the others.

In Workshopping the Heart, Jeri Kroll brings us a feast of poetry: selections from her seven previous collections, poems from 2005 to 2012, and excerpts from her forthcoming verse novel, Vanishing Point. From 1982 to the present we are able to witness an evolution towards a mature poetic voice as Kroll negotiates her way through life’s various traverses and the poetic explorations that both describe and reflect upon them.

In ‘Painting’s Flatness’, Paul Magee ruefully observes the following: ‘If only surfaces were possible / here in the imagination / just to walk and to touch sincerely the ground.’ This, as the title of the poetry collection suggests, is the essence of Stone Postcard: a poet’s search for stability in the face of exquisite and inscrutable change.

Andy Kissane’s fourth collection, Radiance, is a heartening answer to those who, like publisher Stephen Matthews, lament that ‘many modern poets choose to shroud their work in point-scoring obscurity at a time when clarity and accessibility might encourage more people to read poetry’. Kissane doesn’t address this issue directly, but his book is an important negative instance.

The first virtue of Kissane’s poetry here is its empathy, which leads on to an important (though sometimes unfashionable) political dimension; the sonnet ‘Match Girls, 1888’ is a telling example. Two young sisters in a Dickensian match factory begin to notice what is happening to the other girls: the damaged jawbones and bleeding gums. The ending is disturbingly poignant: ‘One / mustn’t complain. Instead, she poked her sister / under the quilt and they laughed at their teeth – / glowing green and ghostly in the warm cave of the bed.’ Similar compassion and outrage can be found in a number of neighbouring poems, particularly ‘The Street Vendor’s Lament’, ‘The Child is Father of the Man’, and ‘The Smell of the Sea’. All deal with dangerous working conditions, and all make their point with technical subtlety and an absence of rhetoric.

The prolific Tracy Ryan’s new novel, Claustrophobia, is a smart and fast-paced hurtle through lust, obsession, and stultifying patterns of dependency and self-delusion. Written in a low-key, ironic style, Ryan borrows from tropes of crime fiction, in particular the novels of Patricia Highsmith, as well as the double-crossing figure of the femme fatale, to tell the story of Pen, a seemingly ordinary and slightly bored woman from the Perth hills. Pen is married to Derrick, whom she has encouraged to succeed in the world, albeit in modest ways, since the emotional breakdown which preceded their meeting. Ten years on, working part-time at Derrick’s school and unable to have children, Pen’s motivation is running low. Incapable of mustering the energy to clear the house or to complete the renovation which has dragged on for years, Pen’s life is suddenly and explosively changed when she finds a returned letter Derrick had sent to his previous lover – the lover whose rejection had sent him into despair.

Silvia Kwon’s début novel explores the legacy of war on an Australian family, seen mainly through the eyes of the wife of a returned soldier. The prologue comprises a vivid and disturbing flashback to Burma in 1944, where Merna’s husband Frank spent time ‘on the line’.

Although narrated in the third person, this is Merna’s story, told from the point of view of a wife torn between the conflicting needs of husband and son. Back on the farm in the 1960s in the Wimmera, against a backdrop of endless drought, Frank struggles to keep afloat, while his son sets his sights on a distant land of opportunity, Japan. Merna takes on the role of peacemaker in a battle between the two men, whose opposing outlooks provide the novel’s source of conflict.

‘The boys are behaving badly’ is the coy tagline for journalist Brigid Delaney’s début novel, about an élite Australian university’s cricket team subjecting a Malaysian exchange student to a grisly hazing ritual that goes too far. Such understatement isn’t indicative of the book itself, which follows a group of thinly drawn characters through pained, often melodramatic soul-searching.

Granta’s recent offering, a special edition devoted to Japan, is a brilliant homage to Japanese wabi sabi. Editor Yuka Igarashi has selected stories and artwork that challenge the tired stereotypes of Nippon to deliver a series of powerful works exploring wabi sabi’s investment in what Andrew Juniper has identified as ‘impermanence, humility, asymmetry and imperfection’.

In order to appeal to a child audience, picture books often deal with similar subjects or themes. To compete in the marketplace, they therefore need a point of difference – something in the artist’s style, the author’s approach, the design of the book to set them apart.

The relationship between children and their pets is a popular picture book subject and one that Jackie French explores in Good Dog Hank (Angus & Robertson, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 97807-32293642), an exuberant tale about a dog who is very much a part of the family. Hank is a Great Dane with chutzpah – a large, likeable pooch with a self-satisfied grin who lollops through the pages of the book creating havoc, but always with the best of intentions. He only eats from the table after everyone has left, and he helps keep the floor clean by catching food as it falls from little fingers. He does not chew socks: he washes them!

French’s text is pared back, with usually only one line per page, plus the occasional parenthetical comment. Nina Rycroft’s colourful illustrations interpret and embellish French’s often ironic observations about canine behaviour. She uses a combination of slapstick and visual humour to explore the pivotal role of the family dog.

I Have a Dog (An Inconvenient Dog) (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781743317815) by Charlotte Lance is similar in concept to Good Dog Hank. The first half of the book examines the negatives of dog ownership, such as sock-chewing and muddy paws, while the second shows the positives, including companionship. However, while the concept is similar, the approach is quite different. I Have a Dog is a physically smaller and more intimate book, with a muted palette and a distinct drawing style.

Lance’s somewhat scruffy, loose-lined illustrations do not have the immediate visual appeal of Rycroft’s – her dog looks like an uncoordinated, overenthusiastic sheep – but the humour underpinning the illustrations rewards closer perusal. Lance’s understated approach to the topic should appeal to a slightly older audience of dog lovers than Good Dog Hank.

A page from Poppy Cat

In Poppy Cat (Scholastic, $24.99 hb, 24 pp, 9781743620168), Sara Acton explores the daily interactions between a child and her pet with a simple text and uncluttered watercolour images. She deals sensitively with the little things that are important to pre-schoolers: getting dressed by themselves, tying their shoelaces, pouring milk from a bottle, generally fitting into the world around them.

Acton’s minimalist illustrations, presented on a white background, are carefully composed to draw the reader’s eye from left to right, thus encouraging the development of pre-reading skills, as children follow the intertwined verbal and visual narratives. This is a pleasant book to peruse and share, and it will hold particular appeal for young cat lovers.

Stephen Michael King also explores interspecies friendships in the charming Snail and Turtle Are Friends (Scholastic, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781743620236). With gentle humour and infectious enthusiasm, he shows how friends can have a close bond, even when they have quite different interests. The duo enjoys doing things together: walking, reading, listening, hiding. But they also have points of difference: one likes the dry, one likes the wet; one likes leaves, one likes flowers; one likes swirls, one likes blobs. But each respects and appreciates the other’s individualism.

King creates comical, expressive images using distinctive patterning, saturated autumnal colours, and fluid line-work. Snail and Turtle are distinct individual characters, whose personalities are imparted through carefully crafted body language. And their leafy world forms a decorative framework around each image, adding visual interest and pops of colour. In Snail and Turtle Are Friends, King has created a reassuring and entertaining tale that will engage the reader’s imagination.

Jackie French’s latest wombat-infested title, The Hairy-Nosed Wombats Find a New Home (Angus & Robertson, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9780732295486) champions an endangered Australian native species that is now rarer than the Giant Panda. French explains how, with only 176 hairy-nosed wombats left, they decide to find a new home where the conditions will be just right for them to breed and thrive. An advance party is sent out to explore new options, and the rest soon follow. The result is a ‘wiggly, wobbly, wonderful wombat’ baby, and the hope that there will be more to come.

Sue deGennaro illustrates the tale with distinctive cartoon-style watercolour and collage images featuring anthropomorphised wombats with dog-like visages that live in comfortably furnished burrows. When they realise that they need to leave their threatened home, they bring out maps – including one of New York – to plan their great escape. Finding a new home and moving there is carried out with gusto.

While deGennaro’s fictionalised approach helps to make a difficult subject more palatable for young children, there is a disconcerting gap between her often tongue-in-cheek urbanised depiction of the wombats with their domestic accoutrements and the reality faced by these endangered animals. Obviously aware of this, the publishers have included a section entitled ‘The True History of the Hairy-Noses’. Fittingly, proceeds from the sale of this book will go to the Wombat Foundation.

A page from That Car!

Imaginative journeys are also at the heart of That Car! (Allen & Unwin, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781743310953) by Cate Kennedy and Carla Zapel. The child narrator tells how she and her siblings find an old car on the farm that their parents have bought from an elderly lady called Mrs Crosbie. Their father moves the car out under the peppercorn tree, and the children spend hours playing in it, heading off wherever their imaginations take them – for tea with the Queen, up Mount Everest, on safari, and even into space.

When Mrs Crosbie returns for a visit, the children discover the nostalgic connection between the farm’s previous owner, who had lived there for sixty years, and the car. Zapel’s watercolour illustrations have a naïve appeal, and there are plenty of interesting details in her double-page landscapes of the places the children ‘travel’ to. This is a warm and engaging tale about the power of the imagination and the things that bind people to a place.

A page from Imagine a City

Imaginative journeys and nostalgic images also feature in Elise Hurst’s impressive Imagine a City (Scholastic, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781742990095). This book has an appealing old-fashioned look, with a red linen cover and accompanying embossed sepia image, red-ink clouds swirling across the endpapers, and cream pages featuring crosshatched black-ink sketches.

Hurst’s minimalist text is poetic and evocative, but it is the illustrations that carry the story, taking the reader on an exhilarating ride through a dreamlike urban landscape. In this eclectic imaginary world inhabited by anthropomorphised creatures, a plethora of characters from childhood fantasies interact with a mother and her two children. Blimp-like fish carry people through the air, while others fly using open umbrellas, à la Mary Poppins, and in the museum, paintings break their frames and come to life. Outside, gargoyles sip tea and bears ride bicycles.

Hurst’s sketches have an otherworldly, nostalgic ambience, reminiscent of watching black-and-white television or leafing through a children’s book from the 1940s, and the lack of colour heightens their dramatic impact. Hurst’s detailed illustrations contain visual references to everything from Peter Pan to Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter to Shakespeare. In Imagine a City, Hurst has created a fascinating and enticing world. She demonstrates how finding a point of difference from other picture books – the majority of which rely on full-colour images – can lead to the creation of something quite special.

Why do you write?

I feel compelled to try and organise my thoughts and the world using words.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes.

Where are you happiest?

On a beach; in a forest; walking; on the couch with a cat; sitting reading, while my partner is sitting and reading in the same room; those moments of flow when writing.